Ugandan teacher mentors evicted over unpaid rent
REB has not paid them for three months
While the mentor program continues to be plagued by poor management, it’s a safer bet to stick to Kinyarwanda. (file photo)
Several Ugandan language mentors hired by the government to coach Rwandan teachers how to use English as a language of instruction have been evicted from their houses after failing to pay their monthly rent.
The Rwanda Focus has learned that teachers’ mentors have gone without pay for the last two months forcing and as a result the mentors piled up debts with the local shops and land lords, who have now run out of patience.
But the mentors, who came over from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, have no money, nor friends or relatives in the rural areas where they were posted earlier this year and have been struggling to survive.
Dan Kunihira, 26, is one of them. Before he was recruited as a language mentor, Kunihira was gainfully employed at the a private primary school in Kigali but opted to serve as a government worker in the teacher language mentoring program initiated by the Rwanda Education board (REB).
“I was thrown out by my landlord and couldn’t get food anymore as all the shop owners had stopped giving me more credit because I already owed them Frw 60,0000,” Kunihira complained.
According to the mentor, REB assigned them to school head teachers who are to be their immediate supervisors and guides, but Kunihira says his head teacher had no time for him. “It’s only the secretary who helped me but he too had limitations. At school, teachers pay 4000 francs per month to organize meals but I had been since suspended from the school meals because I was not contributing,” he explained.
Kunihira is not alone. A Tanzanian mentor who would only identify himself as Israel has also returned to Tanzania saying that he was not ready to starve in a foreign land. “The local people had really done their best to help me but naturally I was not happy burdening people who I guess have their own challenges. Since my employers couldn’t pay me, I had to leave,” said Israel, adding that he too is ready to return if he gets paid.
Others, like Titus from Kenya who was posted at GS. Kabare in Kibungo, have had to find additional jobs to get by – he himself manages to get some earnings from part time work in the village teaching kids English. “It’s definitely hard life and we are surviving by Gods grace,” said Titus, who is charged to mentor 31 teachers at the school with both primary and secondary sections.
Angela in Rulindo, with 27 teachers to mentor, for her part has marking exams from schools in Kigali, but it has not been enough to pay the rent for the last two months.
“I am lucky my landlord has been patient with me but how long can it go on? We only hope REB pays our salaries soon,” she said, adding she has accumulated debts worth 70,000 francs.
Canceled contracts
According to another mentor, identified only as Sylvia posted in Ruhengeri, the affected people were recruited alongside Rwandans in February this year and they signed a one-year contract which promised a Frw 150,000 monthly salary.
However, the first salary was given to them in April, two months after signing the contract. Then in May, they were told they signed a wrong contract and should sign new ones, this time for two years and with a salary of Frw 170,000. “But since then, we have not been paid and no one has given us an explanation,” says Sylvia.
For the Rwandan mentors it has been easier to wait since they have families and friends to fall back on, but the foreigners are now becoming desperate.
When The Rwanda Focus contacted John Rutayisire, REB’s director general, last week, he said he was in a management meeting in which the issue would be addressed, and promised to get back to us with a conclusive answer. He hadn’t done so by press time.
However, an insider revealed that REB is struggling to re-arrange the payroll for both the local and foreign mentors (the latter arrived in the country last Month), which is required for them to effect the payments. He added that the transition to the 2012/13 budget had also made it hard to get the mentors’ salaries paid.
REB might consider hiring mentors to help them establish a payroll.
Posted by Kenneth Agutamba
on Jul 9 2012. Filed under Cover Story, National.
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The news comment is very true ….and spells a typical failure script of the transition to another lingua franca. First, it was the interview results that took over a month to be released. then the failure by the recruitment board to provide any kind of facilitation to the prospective mentors to travel to Rwanda! Then for those that braved it to Rwanda, posting was uncertain and often haphazard. For those few that were posted, their travel to the various stations was on their own account! And then on reaching the stations there was, in most cases, no accommodation, no settling in allowance, nothing! Well some mentors have thrown in the towel, others continue the begging gambit from people supposed to be their mentees, kind headteachers and the friendly Rwandan communities.With such a scenario,the writing might well be on the wall that it is likely to take another 50 years before the very well meant programme shows any positive results.
One wonders if someone somewhere is not cunningly ensuring that the change to the English Language meets its premature demise!
My dear Albert,there may be a cunning fellow(s) who is sabotaging the English Language adoption. It means if such a person(s) is doing the mischief I advise them to read the History of South Africa and what it took for the said language to be official.English is like the deadly AIDS. Once it is introduced, no matter what you do,you cannot stop its spread. Time will bear me witness. The clever guys/gals are those who embrace it earliest.
The Editorial on the tribulations of mentors couldn’t be more to the point.
We request that our brother East Africans treat us with that traditional love so typical of the average Rwandan citizen.
Please refund our transport to Kigali by road, and provide the standard settling in allowance as we await our first salaries.
Today we are meeting in Kigali tomorrow God only knows our brothers from Rwanda will be coming over to work in Kenya or Uganda, and they should expect us to make life as easy as possible for their stay.
Thank you so much the Rwanda Focus for your revelations on the mentors now in Rwanda. We owe you much for we must now think twice before relinquishing our jobs in homeland Tanzania, for imagine getting stuck in a new world where you may be end up jailed for unpaid bills!
Well written Rwanda Focus. Something i not right with the Rwanda Education Board. While the Government is recruiting mentors for the English teachers, it should consider mentors for the bureaucrats. In Africa most projects are failed by highly qualified officers who none the less are not in tandem with the political leadership.
But to be fair to the REB, may be they are overwhelmed by the work at hand. For example one finds only one gentleman Claudien at the posting office. Poor man he might be too overworked and may have little say on policy matters such as settling in allowances etc.Rwanda Focus please probe the real Big men behind this programme.
This is now East Africa from Kigali to Dar el Salam, well their should be some vestige of standardization of workers’ expectations. It is rather chilling to hear of the stories of mentors suffering the way you describe, as if they are some where north as far as Siberia. Please kindly let us be fair to our political leaders and follow up their great dream of one East African Community, this is the only tribute for our heroes such as Paul Kagame!
Please do follow up this story, it is the litmus test for free movement of labour in our East African Community.
I’m surprised about the goings on, for all along I have had great admiration for the Rwandan orderly way of doing things. Surely with Raisi Paul Kagame at the helm, one is assured, I think, that this situation will be corrected with his characteristic vigilance!
As a Rwandan, I am very embarassed by this story, we are know to our regional neigbors as very organised, very competent and quite reliable! That is probably why some of these lads had the confidence to leave their countries for employment in our country, with this sort of treatment, you can now guess what sort of ambassadors they are going to be in their countries…All said, I believe as one reader has said, somebody could be working hard to actually fail English…there’s a French school I know in Kiyovu where kids there speak no English at all but every morning you see Ministers, Deputies and other policy makers dropping their kids there…these are the same people we expect to enforce policy to promote English….These mentors have a strong legal case as the Gov’t has failed in its part to pay for services these unfortunate teachers are offering amidst challenges. Once again I say, I am ashamed of this kind of treatment to people who have come to really help us. President Kagame please, someone has let us down in MINEDUC! Who is it?
I remember at first, we had the Teacher Training which took place in the Holidays, it seemed well organised despite a few reports of again delayed moneys, but it was under a certain white consultant and several others…that program was then abandoned midway and in came the current mentoring, and again the Rwanda Focus I think broke that story with the Dumping of Ugandan Teacher trainers opting for Kenyans…since then, I have followed the Focus on this SAGA and up-to now, nothing seems to be working right! What I don’t understand is how you would make people sign wrong contracts and why you would delay to pay their salaries if the money actually is there. And if its not there, why did you recruit people you can’t pay? And if You can’t pay, why can’t you give reasons? If we are in the habit of mistreating our regional friends, we might end up in a diplomatic row since recruitment was done via our envoys in those countries. However, I agree with the suspicion that some people in Government, who up-to now look at English as an imposed language to be behind these frustrations. We are watching, and thanks to media Diversity, I don’t think The New Times would have reported this sort of story.
It is called SERVICE DELIVERY in professional lingo and customer care in more common usage. It is a deadly disease that plagues we Rwandans and I am beginning to think it is incurable. These REB guys mean no mischief…..it is just the local norm that service is delivered a bit slowly. Our East African brothers and sisters had better do their research before expecting the unattainable here.To us it is normal to be told to return tomorrow for something that is just there on the table.
Someone, somewhere needs to get sacked for this monumental reputation-destroying cock-up. It is thoroughly unprofessional and damages the hard-earned view of a country where things work and all officials are held to high performance standards. As a Rwandan who is forever extolling the virtues of my country vis-a-vis the rest of the neighbourhood in terms of government services, I am ashamed of how these guests have been treated. Henceforth I will be more careful with the praises.
You are more than right Mwene Kalinda. Fire from the top and continue firing until you reach the harmless subordinate staff, then advertise and fill the posts. Be they incompetents,lazy,saboteurs or bribe seeking extortionists fire the whole lot and see how their successors will perform.